Educational Leap - Frogging

On my long haul back from Pittsburgh yesterday (2 planes followed by a seven hour drive.....), I was thinking of course of some of what I heard at NCTE. I was taking some time to think about educators who feel they are falling behind the kids in terms of what it means to be literate. Some are proposing that what we need to do is incrementally, but intensively, increase our skills until we, at some point in the future, are "caught back up" with where the kids are. The problem being of course that the literacy skills, and learning tools that kids are using these days are moving targets. As we edge up in our understanding of what they are doing, and what the possibilities are, the kids have left us behind again as they head off in another direction.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time. This, in some ways, seems to be where we are. We are starting see an ever - expanding gap between "school" literacies and literacies that kids "do" on their own. I come back again to the idea of underground digital apprenticeships. While we teach whatever we teach at school, the kids go home and learn the skills they need to survive and prosper in an inter - connected global economy.

Hence the need to leap - frog. Economists talk about leap - frogging when they look at nations in Africa and Asia that are making quick economic progress in communications, in connecting their people. While in North America and Europe, nations worked through a slow historical progression of sending telegrams, constructing a system of land - based telephone lines, and then moving into a cell - phone based system, developing nations are leaving the previous technologies behind and moving straight to cell - based systems allowing them to catch up quickly, connecting people across their nations. Now that MIT has brought out its $100 laptop, these nations will be on the same "playing field" as our kids very soon.

We need to develop this same idea in education. We need to leave behind ideas of incrementally increasing our understanding, and incrementally changing our teaching methods, slowly bringing people up to speed. This idea worked fine when ideas of literacy and education were not rapidly changing; but they are. We need to be be able to leap - frog in our understandings, in our methods, and in our tools, allowing us to move to where the kids are. If we do not become leaders to our students, we will be followers, seen as irrelevant, and left to cry in our books while the kids are off setting the agenda.

Comments

[Kim Cofino]

Thank you for this post. I have been struggling lately trying to find exactly the right words to explain why we need to utilize new technologies in our classrooms (or any technology for that matter). This post has hit the nail on the head. I will be sharing it with my colleagues on Monday morning. Hopefully this will get some dialogue started in my school as well.